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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the media around BTC being anonymous and untraceable was actually encouraged by the intelligence community and law enforcement. It's certainly been a boon for tracking down a lot of criminals.

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In that spirit, Levine ends his comment as follows: ‘Do you think maybe Satoshi Nakamoto works for the FBI, and invented Bitcoin as a way to get criminals to make a convenient permanent record of their transactions?’

The idea that Satoshi is not one person but a group at the NSA has been going around for a long time.

I don't think it's likely true but it's an entertaining gedanken experiment.

Now that is a movie script that almost writes itself

Given how inaccurate the average news media is at everything else what makes you think they would need to encourage that?

I seriously doubt it. Remember, "never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence or stupidity." Our law enforcement community isn't that bright or long-term thinking. Plus, once criminals get it through their thick skulls that BTC really is traceable after all, they won't use it any more.

But if the opponent knows you subscribe to this rule (assume ignorance over malice), couldn't they take advantage of this?

The aphorism does not call upon you to assume good intentions, but to avoid attempting to establish intention when it has no benefit to solving the problem noted.

Yes, there is no stable state of the system in which ignorance and malice are assessed accurately. If you don't want the rate of malicious action to increase, you need to overdiagnose it.

I doubt it too, but dislike the meme you cited. Intelligence agencies are very much capable of producing elaborate, long term plans and are quite good with crypto. They could introduce it to the world without cooperation or coordination with regular law enforcement. Not saying that they did.

I have never heard a convincing argument for your quote and would like everyone to at least consider malice when the situation warrants it. Maybe "follow the money" would be an equally valid, but contradictory heuristic to deal with unclear situations.

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